The third Nordic-Hawaii Summer School will be held July 1-14, 2015, in Iceland. Credit: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

Applications for the third Nordic-Hawaii astrobiology Summer School are due March 15 at 23:59:00 UTC. The course will take place in Iceland from July 1 to 14, 2015.

Participants will receive a high-level introduction into water’s role in the evolution of life in the cosmos, starting from the formation of water molecules in space and ending with the evolution of the first organisms.

The program comprises: - Lectures by internationally leading scientists covering a broad range ...

The Mariner 9 mission first saw the peak of Olympus Mons on Mars in the midst of a global dust storm in 1971. Credit: NASA/JPL

A new study of emissions from Martian volcanoes suggests there is no activity going on right now, but researchers aren’t ruling out recent eruptions.

Previously, scientists have used ground-based telescopes to perform short-term searches for sulfuric acid on Mars — a key indicator of volcanic activity. Now, a new instrument on Europe’s next Mars spacecraft could be used for long-term, up-close searches.

Deep-sea microorganisms are unchanged over more than 2 billion years. Credit: UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life

Scientists have discovered 1.8 billion-year-old fossil microorganisms in fossilized deep-sea mud from Western Australia. It appears that the sulfur-cycling microbial community is almost identical to microbial fossils from 2.3 billion-years-ago, and to modern communities found off the coast of South America.

The stability of these communities could be evidence of a long-term lack of evolution, which reflects the lack of change in their environment. This would be an example of a theory known as evolution ...

Unlike our in-person events, in this heat you will record yourself giving a 3-minute, powerpoint-free presentation, create a YouTube video of it, and submit that to us no later than March 16th. Then join us for the live, online judging event on March 18th to receive feedback from the judges. We are also planning a live, online science communications workshop, still TBA.

A telescope will soon allow astronomers to probe the atmosphere of Earthlike exoplanets for signs of life. To prepare, Lisa Kaltenegger and her team at Cornell’s Institute for Pale Blue Dots are modeling the atmospheric fingerprints for hundreds of potential alien worlds. They are building a database of atmospheric fingerprints that will then be used as “ID cards” to guide the study of exoplanet atmospheres with the James Webb Space Telescope and other future large telescopes.

Kaltenegger described her approach in a talk for the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Director Seminar Series last December.

Bill Bottke of the Department of Space Studies at the Southwest Research Institute. Credit: SwRI

Bill Bottke of Southwest Research Institute will be presenting the next NAI Director’s Seminar on February 23, 2015, at 1pm Pacific Standard Time. A link to the web broadcast will be available here at 12:45pm PST on Feb 23.

Bottke’s talk, “Early Solar System Bombardment and Earth’s Habitability,” will discuss insights about the bombardment history of the early Earth based on a new bombardment model for the inner Solar System that stretches from Mercury to the asteroid belt.

A new online astrobiology course in Spanish, “Catástrofes Naturales y Eventos de Extinción” (Natural Catastrophes and Extinction Events), will be taking place this year from May 15 to June 30. The course consists of three Modules with ten thematic units. Ten instructors will cover a wide range topics relevant to catastrophes and extinction events on Earth.

True color and feature-highlighted photos of Europa. The bright feature towards the lower right of the disk is the 45 km diameter crater Pwyll. Credit: NASA

Powerful radio signals that Jupiter generates could be used to help researchers scan its giant moons for oceans that could be home to extraterrestrial life, according to a recent study submitted to the journal Icarus.

The research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA and funded through the Internal Research and Technology Development program.

A new study supported by the NASA Astrobiology Institute and the Astrobiology program is shedding light on microbial communities that live in low-temperature fluids just beneath the ocean crust. The largest aquifer system on Earth exists beneath the crust at the bottom of our planet’s oceans, yet life in this remote environment has remained relatively unexplored for decades. By drilling into the ocean floor, scientists retrieved low-temperature (<100°C) fluids from the environment. In the samples they found evidence of sulfate reducing microbes over a range of temperatures.

The results suggest that sulfate reducing microbes could be responsible for the removal of organic matter in ...

In the muddy sediments beneath the deep sea, NAI-funded astrobiologists have found ancient communities of microbes that have remained virtually unchanged for 2.3 billion years.

Researchers say these microscopic organisms are an example of “extreme evolutionary stasis” and represent the greatest lack of evolution ever seen.

They may also, paradoxically, prove that Darwin’s theory of evolution is true.

“If evolution is a product of changes in the physical and biological environment, and there are no changes in the physical and biological environment, then there will be no evolution,” said William Schopf, a paleobiologist at UCLA.

NASA seeks a new Director for the NASA Astrobiology Institute (NAI). The ideal candidate will be an internationally recognized scientist with proven experience in leading or managing large interdisciplinary research programs or projects, possessed with a vision for leading the Institute into the future. Applicants for this position should have a broad scientific perspective on astrobiology, experience in conducting interdisciplinary scientific research, and demonstrated skills needed to harness the strengths of disparate research communities towards a greater goal. S/he should understand how to grow a research endeavor and respond to changing budget climates while focusing on maximizing the scientific ...

Super-Earths And Life is a course offered by HarvardX about alien life, how we search for it, and what this teaches us about our place in the universe.

In the past decade astronomers have made incredible advances in the discovery of planets outside our solar system. Thirty years ago, we knew only of the planets in our own solar system. Now we know of thousands circling nearby stars.

Meanwhile, biologists have gained a strong understanding of how life evolved on our own planet, all the way back to the earliest cells. We can describe how simple molecules can assemble themselves ...

Students in the Habitable Worlds course learn what goes into making a planet. Credit: Anbar/Horodyskyj

NAI-funded astrobiologists and educators at Arizona State University have made great strides in online education. Using themes in astrobiology, their Habitable Worlds course brings critical thinking skills to non-science majors…and the world is taking notice.

Astrobiologist Aims to Make Science Education More Interactive

I remember battling sleepiness as I slouched in a large lecture hall, squinting to make out the writing on the blackboard during my freshman introductory physics course in college. My difficulty staying alert in class was not the fault of ...

New from the PlanetQuest group at JPL, these gorgeous posters depict images of travel to worlds orbiting stars other than our own Sun! Just as mid-century travel posters enticed would-be travelers to exotic locales such as the islands of the Caribbean and South Pacific, we are similarly beckoned to consider places beyond our imagination – beyond our Solar System!

Some of the purported “swimmers” in the Cave of the Swimmers, Egypt. Credit: NASA Photo/Chris McKay

Seven thousand year-old rock paintings in the Sahara desert have, somewhat serendipitously, helped uncover evidence of ancient lake beds. Researchers discovered the mineral remnants of the lake while studying a region well-known for its rock art. The research — presented in the Journal of African Earth Sciences — was partly funded by the NASA Astrobiology Program.